The biggest cities on the planet tend to be the ones most in need of an effective security system. One feature of the modern integrated city-wide security system is the Closed-Circuit Television, or CCTV, which enables people to monitor activities from remote locations using installed video cameras.

The city of Lagos will be getting its own video surveillance system starting next month if all goes to plan. The Lagos State government has indicated that it wants to boost its capacity to keep tabs on things going on in the city by installing 13,000 closed-circuit cameras in locations across it. The aim of the project, according to the government, is to fight crime and raise Lagos’s profile as a safe place to reside and invest in.

Olufemi Odubiyi, the Lagos Commissioner for Science and Technology said the CCTVs were to be deployed as part of the Smart City Project, a grand vision of the state government to make Lagos Africa’s first true smart city, interconnected on all levels afforded by modern communication channels.

Lagos will be joining a host of other world cities on the list of metropolises with large surveillance networks. That list, which has the cities of London, Beijing, and Chicago, continues to swell, as governments, businesses and individuals increasingly turn to modern video camera-based monitoring systems to deter and detect criminal activity. Studies seem to suggest that the strategy works, with significant drops in the rates of property thefts in neighbourhoods that adopt them being recorded. This may be due to the fact that thieves tend to keep off from areas in which their activities can be monitored by security agents.

The cameras are be installed at various locations in Lagos over a period spanning 16 to 18 months, starting from September.

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